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The Iran Impasse: No Stockpile to Strike With, No Nerves to Outlast Tehran

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Central Investigation Question

Why do the hosts read the US-Iran standoff as an impasse that Washington cannot break by force or outlast by pressure?

An Impasse Born of a Failed Attack

The week's headline news is an Axios report on a difficult Trump-Netanyahu phone call, but Alex Christoforou and Alexander Mercouris argue the real story is structural: the United States and Iran are stuck, and the stuck-ness was manufactured in March and April. The Axios piece, as Christoforou relays it, offers the familiar casting — good cop Trump who wants diplomacy, bad cop Netanyahu who wants an attack — plus a letter of intent being drafted with Pakistan's mediation and no official word on where any of it stands. The verified Axios report of May 20 describes a tense Tuesday call triggered by a new Iran peace proposal: a letter of intent to be mediated by Qatar and Pakistan, a 30-day negotiation window, and a skeptical Netanyahu.

Drawing on what he calls an accumulating mass of US media reporting, Mercouris goes further: the impasse is the result of a failed attack on Iran in March and April — an attack that was even less successful than it initially appeared — and that is what makes the Iranians confident and Washington confused. The specifics stack up on Iran's side of the ledger. Iran, he says, has preserved most of its ballistic missiles: stockpile mostly intact, launchers mostly intact and spread across the country, with large numbers still close to the Strait of Hormuz. The Iranians have been much more successful tracking and striking US aircraft over Iran than previously known — including stealth aircraft — with reports of advanced Russian radar assistance and, he notes, partial confirmation from Jim Webb, a military man and friend of the program. And they seem to have reactivated much of their military production, still building drones and possibly missiles.

The Pressure Lands on Washington

The blockade, Mercouris concedes, is probably having an effect — but siege is Iran's natural habitat. Iran is a country accustomed over decades to a state of siege, he says, still receiving help through the Caspian Sea, the Central Asian land routes and Pakistan — so the pressure is not as great as the Trump administration wants people to think. The revealing signals are American. The US Navy has come out publicly saying it cannot escort ships through the Strait of Hormuz, and attempts to force the Strait open militarily have been unsuccessful. Reporting in outlets like the Financial Times, he adds, sees June as the month the global economy runs out of buffers — actual shortages and steeply rising energy costs. That FT warning was published on May 5 under the title "The growing risk of a 'non-linear spike' in oil prices," with a standfirst reading "The global economy will soon be running on fumes."

Inside the White House, the pressure produced a near-miss. Trump was about to launch an attack on Iran a few days ago and called it off at the last moment — officially because the Persian Gulf states talked him out of it. The real story, per the US media reports Mercouris relays: it was the US military itself that told him not to — we're not ready, we're not in any condition to change the calculus on the battlefronts, the Iranians are prepared for us and can intercept our aircraft. And the depletion is being briefed in the open. The Washington Post, Christoforou notes, reports that the US stockpile of interceptor missiles — and, he imagines, of just about everything — is depleted, with 50% of THAAD interceptors gone. The verified Washington Post report of May 21, citing Pentagon assessments, says the US fired over 200 THAAD interceptors — about half its stockpile — and that Iran retains roughly 70% of its stockpiles. All of these depletion reports, Mercouris observes, come from the military: it is the Pentagon briefing the media, as part of the argument inside the White House to get Trump to accept that another strike is an incredibly bad idea.

What More Strikes Would Achieve

Asked directly what another round of airstrikes would accomplish, Mercouris's answer is: nothing good. The damage done during the 40-day war now looks less extensive than reported, and the Iranians, with an effective construction industry, have apparently repaired much of it — so the US would be attacking targets the Iranians could probably repair quite quickly. Going deep inside Iran to extract the uranium — Trump's "dust" — would be such an extraordinarily high-risk operation that, on his account, pretty much everybody agrees the United States should not even consider it; the F-15 navigator episode already showed how dangerous operations deep inside Iran are. He keeps the ledger honest in both directions: Iran is under pressure too — the sea blockade is having an effect, inflation has gone higher, the currency is weak — just not enough to force a compromise while the Iranians feel they are in a position of advantage.

A War of Nerves Washington Cannot Win

A deal, in Mercouris's view, is still possible — if Washington actually negotiates. There is still potential for a deal, he says, since China, Russia and Pakistan would put pressure on Iran if its demands turned unreasonable — Tehran cannot go head-to-head with the United States without its friends' support. But the current Pakistani message-passing — the same set of proposals shuttling back and forth, Trump losing his temper at each Iranian reply — is not negotiation; what is needed are proper face-to-face talks, presumably in Islamabad.

Christoforou reframes the standoff as a waiting game, and Mercouris sharpens it: it is a waiting game and also a war of nerves, and the constant flips of position are not scaring the Iranians — they are creating confusion in Washington and doubts among America's Persian Gulf allies. The timeline is slipping, too. A week or two ago, the thinking in Washington — per the CIA assessment — was that the Iranian economy had three months, if not four, before collapse. Now, Christoforou judges, Iran could probably go until the end of the year, while the bond market, the energy crisis coming, and the fertilizer and food crisis about to come tell him the US will not make it three months. You just get the sense, he says, that they are not going to be able to outlast Iran in this war of nerves.

The Gulf States Are Trapped

The states that egged Washington on, Mercouris notes, are now the ones caught in the trap. The Persian Gulf states all came together before the war and told the US to go ahead and do it, assuming it would end very quickly with Iran's collapse — and now they find themselves trapped in the waiting game. They have had to agree currency swaps with the US Federal Reserve Board to keep their dollar-linked currencies stable, and they are very worried about a resumption of the war bringing further attacks on infrastructure that has already taken heavy damage — in Saudi Arabia's case, the Houthis joining in and closing off the Red Sea. The Saudis themselves have publicly said they are extremely worried about an attack on the desalination plants, and they have now seen that US air defense systems are not able to stop or prevent Iranian attacks on them. So they are hedging: the UAE president, for example, has had a chat with Putin, and the Saudi foreign minister has been very busy talking to the Iranians, mostly to the Russians, and also to the Chinese. And soon, Mercouris predicts, they will start repatriating funds from the United States and Europe — even with the Fed swaps, the arrangement is a major drain on their resources.

The Ahmadinejad Revelation

The episode's closing act is the strangest: the New York Times report that the war's original goal was installing Ahmadinejad. The original idea behind the American-Israeli attack, Mercouris says — calling it a revelation he unfortunately believes to be true — was to crash the Iranian regime and replace it with Ahmadinejad of all people. The verified New York Times report of May 19, by Mazzetti, Barnes, Fassihi and Bergman, says the early war goal was to install the hard-line former president as Iran's leader. Christoforou retells the story: the strike on Ahmadinejad's house — where he was under house arrest — was actually aimed at his guards and the security around it, so he could be freed to assume power; but he was injured in the strike and got cold feet at the last moment.

Mercouris reads the absence of denials as the tell. There have been no convincing denials of the story's truth — nobody has really come out and said the whole thing is nonsense — which suggests to him that the whole operation was based on a massive amount of misunderstanding, poor intelligence and wishful thinking about Iran. The Israelis, after all, had clearly penetrated deep into Iran's political and military system before the war — but became so fixed on covert operations, killing nuclear scientists and disrupting Iran's programs, that they were not carrying out proper assessments of the entire situation. Anyone who remembers Ahmadinejad, he says, knows what a deeply discredited figure he is in Iran and how unbelievably anti-Israel and anti-American he was — a completely unlikely, even ridiculous figure to install as leader of a post-regime Iran. The alternatives were no better: one faction seems to have been thinking of the former crown prince, the son of the late Shah; another group of Ahmadinejad.

Christoforou supplies the frame: this is how neocons think — they always look at and focus on the regime change, and they never think of the day after. And how has figuring out the day after gone for them, over all the regime changes of the past 10, 20 years? For the neocons personally, very well, Mercouris answers — they continue to run things, nobody is fired, their think tanks still get vast amounts of money. For everyone else, his verdict lands on the whole enterprise: what we are looking at here is a catastrophic intelligence failure — on the same kind of scale as the assumption that freezing the Russian assets would cause the collapse of the entire Russian economy.

Everything in this episode is the hosts' attributed reading of unnamed and cited reporting. Whether Iran holds out to year-end, whether talks ever reach Islamabad, and whether the Ahmadinejad story remains un-denied are questions the coming months will answer.

Interview Highlights2 exchanges

Direct dialogue & timestamps from the recording

QAlex Christoforou
08:52

Could US military strikes against Iran actually change the situation on the ground — achieve regime change or topple the government?

AAlexander Mercouris

Pentagon officials themselves are briefing the media on the depletion of interceptors and weapons — part of an argument inside the White House, since the military is still under pressure from Trump and from others in the administration who cannot get their minds round the fact that the United States is in this position of weakness. On what strikes would achieve: Mercouris does not think they would achieve anything good. The United States could undoubtedly do a lot of damage to Iranian infrastructure, but the damage done during the 40-day war in March and April now appears less extensive than reported, and the Iranians, who have an effective construction industry, have apparently repaired much of it — strikes would hit targets that could be repaired quite quickly. As for extracting material from deep inside Iran, pretty much everybody agrees that would be such an extraordinarily high-risk operation that the United States should not even consider it. The episode with the rescue of the F-15 navigator, if that is what it really was, already shows that operations deep inside Iran are extremely dangerous and, in fact, unwise.

QAlex Christoforou
24:23

What does Mercouris make of the New York Times report that Israel and the United States wanted Ahmadinejad to lead a post-regime Iran?

AAlexander Mercouris

Mercouris starts with the report's credibility: there have been no convincing denials, so it is probably true — and if so, the whole operation was built on wishful thinking. In his view the Israelis, though they had penetrated Iran's political and military system before the war, put all their energy into covert action — killing scientists, disrupting programs — and never made a sober assessment of Iran as a whole. Take the choice of leader: Ahmadinejad is a discredited figure in Iran and was always fiercely anti-Israel and anti-American, so installing him was absurd from the start; and beyond him, the Americans and Israelis had no credible candidate at all — one faction thought of the exiled crown prince, the late Shah's son, another of Ahmadinejad himself. He then turns on the neoconservative habit of mind: fixated on regime change, never asking what comes the day after. It never cost the neocons personally — nobody was fired, the think-tank money kept flowing — while the United States paid the bill. Every key assumption behind the operation proved wrong: Iran's air defenses were not devastated, its missiles were not weakened, the expected uprising never came, no leader-in-waiting emerged. In his judgment a catastrophic intelligence failure, on the scale of the belief that freezing Russia's assets would collapse the Russian economy.

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